Eyeless, they measure 1 millimeter long. They’re self-fertilizing hermaphrodites that lay their own eggs. And thousands of them inhabit a Florida Institute of Technology laboratory, providing valuable genetic information for researchers in the battle against breast cancer.

"If you want to study a human, there's 100 trillion cells in a human. In a worm, which is the size of a comma, there's only 959 cells. So that's really amazing. If you want to study how cells interact, how different tissues work, there's no better system," said co-organizer Eric Guisbert, assistant professor of biological sciences.

"They have 302 neurons. That's their entire brain — 302 neurons — and we can look and see where all the connections are," Guisbert said.

The Florida Worm Meeting logo depicts a gray worm wrapped around the Sunshine State like a colossal boa constrictor.

Scheduled talks include “Restoring the Mental Health of Worms with Antipsychotics: Studies with Azaperone.”

Guisbert expects roughly 70 scientists, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students from "the worm community" to attend. Florida features 18 worm research laboratories.

The primitive creatures are model organisms for molecular research, starring in experiments that have yielded a trio of Nobel Prizes. Nematode worms have been studied during NASA space shuttle missions and aboard the International Space Station.

"They're so simple and easy to work with that a lot of big discoveries have come out of a small worm," Guisbert said.

"You grow them on little dishes. You feed them bacteria. So we have lots and lots of worms," he said.

"They live two to three weeks, so you can do aging-type studies. And we do a little bit of that. If you read on the Internet that you should have a glass of wine every day and it'll make you live longer, we can easily add ethanol to the worm plates and see: Does that make the worms live longer or not?" he said.

Florida Tech's regional worm event is sandwiched between the May 5 Bay Area Worm Meeting in Santa Cruz, California and the May 24 Front Range Worm Symposium at Colorado State University.

Saturday's keynote speaker is Dr. Oliver Hobert, a Columbia University professor and neurobiologist.

"I don’t love them because they look or do anything cute. They’re just a very, very powerful experimental model organism. And that's what I personally enjoy," Hobert said of nematode worms.

"We can completely understand, perhaps in the future, how a genetic blueprint is being translated into building an animal. And you need simplicity for that. And it's the simplicity of the worm that I find personally very satisfying," he said.

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